the world. ::::::Oh, Louisette! I think of you, and I want to cry! There are so many moments like this every day! Is that why I love Ghislaine so much—because I look at her and I see you? Well, no, because I loved her this way while you were still with us, too. A man’s life doesn’t begin until he has his first child. You see your soul in another person’s eyes, and you love her more than yourself, and that feeling is sublime!:::::: Ghislaine had the sort of confidence a child gets only if her parents spend a lot of time with her—a lot. Some would argue that a girl like Ghislaine, who is so close to her family, should go away to college and learn early that she’s entering a life in which she is going to find herself in one alien context after another and should figure out strategies on her own. Lantier didn’t agree with that. All this business about “contexts” and “life strategies” and alien this and alien that—it was all a concept with no bottom to it. It was just faux-psychological lufts and wafts. The main thing, to him, was that the campus of the University of Miami was only twenty minutes away from their house. Anywhere else she would have been “a Haitian girl.” Oh, it would come out, but here she wasn’t “that Haitian girl I room with” or any other form of that trap in which “if you say I’m this, then obviously I can’t be that.” Here she can be what she is and has become. She’s a very nice-looking young woman… Even as those words formed in his mind, he knew he was putting her on a second tier. She wasn’t as beautiful as a Northern European blonde, an Estonian or a Lithuanian or a Norwegian or a Russian, and she wouldn’t be mistaken for a Latin beauty, either, despite having some features in common with a Latina. No, she was herself. The very sight of Ghislaine sitting there in that little chair with such perfect posture—Louisette!—you made sure Ghislaine and Philippe acquired that while they were too young to question it! He wanted to get up from his anonymous French swivel chair and go over and embrace Ghislaine right now. South Beach Outreach! It was almost too good to be true.
Who’s that?
Lantier’s office door was closed, but he and Ghislaine looked in the direction of the side door, which opened into the kitchen. Two people were coming up the four or five steps that led to the door from outside. Philippe? But Lee de Forest, Philippe’s high school, wouldn’t let out for more than two hours. The voice sounded like Philippe’s—but it was speaking Creole. Creole!
A second voice said, “Eske men papa ou?” (Your father here?)
The first voice said, “No, li inivèsite. Pa di anyen, okay?” (No, he at the university. Listen, we don’t talk to nobody about this, okay?)
The second voice said, “Mwen konnen.” (I know.)
The first said, in Creole, “My father, he don’t like guys like that, but he don’ need know about this thing. Nome sayin’, bro?”
“He no like me, neither, Philippe.”
“How you know that? He don’t say nothing to me.”
“Oh, he not say nothing to me, neither. He don’t need to. I see the way he look at me—or not look at me. He look right through me. I’m not there. Nome sayin’?”
Lantier looked at Ghislaine. So it was Philippe. ::::::Philippe and his black Haitian buddy, God help us, Antoine.:::::: And Antoine was right. Lantier didn’t like looking at him or talking to him. Antoine always tried to be cool and speak in perfect Black English, every illiterate, seventy-five-IQ syllable and sound of it. When that was too difficult a linguistic leap, he reverted to Creole. Antoine was one of those black-as-midnight Haitians—and their number was legion—who said tablo, Creole for “the table,” and hadn’t the slightest notion that it might have anything at all to do with la table, French for “the table.”
Ghislaine had the expression of someone who has taken in a big breath but isn’t letting it out. She looked terribly anxious. Lantier guessed it wasn’t about what the boys had said, since her knowledge of Creole was next to nothing. It was the fact that Philippe was jabbering Creole at all chez Lantier—and within Père Lantier’s earshot—and, on top of that, with a very dark Low-Rent Haitian pal her father did not want to set foot in his house… and